I am posting this Youtube clip of a lecture by one Dr Iwamura with the following comment from someone with a nom de plume of 'Dlight Sky'.

Talk about Radical Abundance! Thanks for finding this, it's the best talk by Iwamura I've seen so far. It's obvious that this is very mature technology. It's cool to see that they are now able to create platinum from tungsten (almost like creating gold from lead). Since tungsten costs about $50 per kilo and platinum about $3000 per kilo there is potential to make money with this technology, if significant quantities could be produced.

Interestingly Mitusubishi Heavy Industries is primarily interested in the technology for transmutation of radioactive waste from conventional nuclear reactors into non-radioactive elements

Because of this focus they haven't done much work on turning this into an energy-producing technology which it clearly has the potential to be. This is a clean fusion reaction which produces very little radiation.

This looks like an ordinary talk, but it's describing a massive paradigm shift showing a technology that has the potential to solve the world's energy problems. It has clearly proven that nuclear fusion can take place inside of a metal lattice at very low energy states. Most of his experiments don't require any input power at all.

Unfortunately his experiments have been associated with "cold fusion" (which it is) and are relatively unknown outside of a small circle. Also if the military grabs on to this, which they probably have, they likely keep any successes to themselves.

However one can see from the talk that this is quite mature technology, and they have used many sophisticated setups with an array of different sensors to verify the results.

Once commercialized, when we buy a new car it will come pre-loaded with a bit of cesium and heavy water and we will be able to run the car for its whole life without ever needing to re-fuel.

This mature technology is already here. No pollution, no mess, no fuss. It should have spawned a gigantic wave of research, but for some reason hasn't yet. There is a apparently a deep obstacle operating here, whether it's conceptual, spiritual or emotional--mankind simply isn't ready to receive this incredible gift yet.

I'd be interested in what our resident physicists and cynics have to say.

Longer answer: Quantum mechanics permits only a couple of pathways to fuse hydrogen into helium. They all produce characteristic fast neutrons. No neutrons, no fusion.

If it actually worked, you would Not Want one in your car. Hot neutrons are useful in materials science laboratory beam lines, stars and fast breeder reactors. Everywhere else they are radioactive pollution.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

This is not cold fusion, and it could be an energy source (it must be exothermic or it wouldn't happen). Whether it can be done safely from the point of view of both chemical and radioactive contamination is less obvious:

With the caveat that I never did proper nuclear physics, I have a very hard time seeing how the chemical bonds in a palladium matrix can overcome the sort of potentials you would need to overcome to get a hydrogen isotope nucleus close enough to fuse with a tungsten nucleus. The deuterium should be facing an unshielded 10+ elemental charge Coulomb potential long before it gets close enough to have a non-trivial probability of tunneling through it. The sort of energy you need to overcome that potential barrier is sufficient to tear apart the crystal lattice a thousand times over.

For that matter, I have a very hard time seeing how you can do any of that without getting at the very least hard x-rays when the electron structure re-settles.

So even though I haven't solved the quantum mechanic equations to conclusively prove that it's impossible, it is not something I would bet money on.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

I suspect this is not a matter of nuclear physics but of solid state physics. The point is that hydrogen has an unusually high affinity for adsorption into a palladium matrix. Maybe that means deuterium can easily propagate within the palladium matrix. Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can propagate through a pure enough crystal as if it were in empty space, so maybe once the deuterium is adsorbed into the palladium the single electron is stripped into the metal's electron gas and the resulting free deuteron forms a deuterium gas. This might increase the interaction cross-section of the deuterons with the impurity metallic nuclei, increasing the rate of the interaction (for instance)

20Ca + 2D -> 22Sc* -> 22Ti + e- - νe

(I cannot write a bar over the nu for an antineutrino so I write 'minus one neutrino' :)

Neutron diffraction studies have shown that hydrogen atoms randomly occupy the octahedral interstices in the metal lattice (in an fcc lattice there is one octahedral hole per metal atom). The limit of absorption at normal pressures is PdH0.7, indicating that approximately 70% of the octahedral holes are occupied. The absorption of hydrogen is reversible, and hydrogen rapidly diffuses through the metal lattice. Metallic conductivity reduces as hydrogen is absorbed, until at around PdH0.5 the solid becomes a semiconductor.

The bulk adsorption and rapid diffusion mean that the hydrogen atoms can tunnel from the centre of one octahedral site to the next with a relatively high amplitude. If metal impurities (say, a Calcium atom) also like to occupy the same insterstices that hydrogen propagates in, then the interaction cross-section of the hydrogen with the impurity atoms would be enhanced with respect to the gas phase.

There are off-the-shelf detectors that can split a gamma signal into energy channels, so unless that signature is smack, dab in the middle of the potassium decay channel, you should be able to tell it from background easily enough.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

From the beta decay, yes. But after the beta decay the nucleus will be in an excited state because something that used to be a neutron is now a proton.

It would be quite extraordinary for you to find that replacing a neutron with a proton would not move the minimum energy configuration of the nucleus. And the transition to that new minimum energy configuration would most likely be accompanied by a gamma fingerprint, courtesy of the strong nuclear force.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

There are five observationally stable isotopes (40Ca, 42Ca, 43Ca, 44Ca and 46Ca), plus one isotope (48Ca) with such a long half-life that for all practical purposes it can be considered stable.

Although 40Ca is the most abundant isotope by far, only 44Ca, 46Ca and 48Ca can result in stable Titanium isotopes by Deuterium absorption followed by beta decay. 44Ca, with a natural abundance of a couple percent, would seem like the only suitable candidate.

The intermediate states would have to be 46Sc, 48Sc or 50Sc respectively, and given that

The isotopes of scandium range in atomic weight from 36 u (36Sc) to 60 u (60Sc). The primary decay mode at masses lower than the only stable isotope, 45Sc, is Beta-plus or electron capture, and the primary mode at masses above it is beta-minus. The primary decay products at atomic weights below 45Sc are calcium isotopes and the primary products from higher atomic weights are titanium isotopes.

it would seem to fit.

Now let's look at the energy balance. The isotopic masses of the Calcium and Titanium isotopes are (in atomic units):

while the mass of Deuterium is 2.01410178. The smallest energy release would be from the 44Ca -> 46Tireaction. The energy difference is 0.01695198u. The electron rest mass is 0.0005486u, so almost the entire energy difference would be released: 0.0164034u or 15MeV. That's a lot of energy...

"analogous to alpha absorption". There is no beta decay, therefore just gamma emission from nuclear rearrangement. And the goal is not energy but treatment of nuclear waste. If you can make it so that nuclear waste treatment doesn't cost energy, that's obviously a plus. But this isn't promising a hydrogen car.

They are not talking about impurities in the Palladium matrix. They make a palladium "membrane". through which Deuterium flows due to a pressure difference of 1 Atmosphere. On the high pressure side of the membrane they deposit the metals they want to transmute, and they collect them after the experiment.

My suggestion was simply that an unintended LENR of a type other than expected might have occurred in the infamous cold fusion experiments. Were it due to some uncontrolled contamination any products might not have been produced in a manner that their instruments would have detected. Others, or even they themselves, could have tried the intended experiment but have missed the contamination that allowed something to happen.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Researchers from Toyota Central Research and Development Laboratories performed an independent replication of a Mitsubishi low-energy nuclear reaction transmutation experiment, according to a physicist from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries speaking at the American Nuclear Society LENR session on Nov. 14 in San Diego, Calif.

The physicist, Yasuhiro Iwamura, told the ANS audience that the Toyota researchers confirmed that nuclear changes from one element to another took place without the use of high-energy nuclear physics. Most scientists who have not followed this field closely consider such profound claims inconceivable. Toyota used a LENR deuterium-permeation transmutation method that Iwamura invented.

Iwamura has been working with this LENR method for 14 years. He said that one of his LENR transmutations was closely but not identically replicated by Toyota. Osaka University and Iwate University previously reported similar replications.

So Iwamura is doing research for Mitsubishi.

It is hard to find academic papers about this stuff: Iwamura has at least one from 2002, but it was published in a Japanese journal (in English) which I'm not sure is widely read outside Japan.

Though working with Palladium hydrides, Iwamura does not mention 'cold fusion' nor does he cite Fleischmann and Pons.

Though working with Palladium hydrides, Iwamura does not mention 'cold fusion' nor does he cite Fleischmann and Pons.

One can hardly blame him for not wanting to hang a 'kick me' sign around his neck. But, is it possible that what he has done might suggest how Fleischmann and Pons might have actually gotten a positive result on some occasions while others did not? Might there have been an uncontrolled and even unknown variable at work for Fleischmann and Pons?

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

That must have been intended as 'don't require any net input power'. He shows an apparatus in one case that has a multilayer prepared surface that required sputtering and has the material in a chamber with deuterium gas on one side of a barrier and a high vacuum on the other. It does not require high temperature or pressure though and the reaction itself, as Mig noted, must be exothermic.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

It's cool to see that they are now able to create platinum from tungsten (almost like creating gold from lead). Since tungsten costs about $50 per kilo and platinum about $3000 per kilo there is potential to make money with this technology, if significant quantities could be produced.

It may be even more cost effective to produce useable platinum catalysts by this method. They may even find highly effective mixtures of transmuted elements that could be deposited onto suitable substrates as they are transmuted. This could be a boon for fuel cell manufacturing.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

The price is usually quoted in troy ounces = 31.1 grams, in the precious metal market. It was $1,629/oz at close Friday, while gold was $1662.70/oz. at close. For a long time platinum traded at a small premium to gold, but not recently.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Gold is not a good place to sit - it is vulnerable to mining advances (and if people really start working the hot vent copper deposits, that is going to mean a large side stream of gold production), and is counter cyclical - it is an asset to buy when everyone is piling into the next big thing and regard gold as boring, ie: in no way now.
Most importantly, the investor profile is very, very volatile.
People buy gold because they are scared. This means that an external price shock of any kind is highly likely to kick off a stampede out of gold.

From what I see on the Kitco charts, gold was wildly speculated in 1979-80 when it hit $840 an ounce and then collapsed to $300-400 for two decades. The present run picked up momentum in 2006 and has since tripled. The January 1980 event was certainly fed by high inflation and international political unrest. It was much different from the slow climb now going on.

I suspect it's China and India that are investing heavily while the IMF hasn't put its gold up for sale for some time now, 2009 if I'm not mistaken.

Gold doesn't have an Internal Rate of Return. Thus, the future price totally determines the ROI with the future price being amid whatever frenzy (or not - see my comment to De Gondi, above) The Market® is undergoing at that instance in time.

As a purely savings vehicle gold does have some redeeming qualities. But not to the extent the gold bugs fantasize.

This mature technology is already here. No pollution, no mess, no fuss. It should have spawned a gigantic wave of research, but for some reason hasn't yet. There is a apparently a deep obstacle operating here, whether it's conceptual, spiritual or emotional--mankind simply isn't ready to receive this incredible gift yet.

It is far simpler to consider that most researchers, or at least their supervisors, have a good apprehension of the likely effects of publishing on a topic that could obsolete the business model of a group of businesses that are major contributors to universities and politicians and have major interests in various media corporations. They don't even have to confer with anyone to know not to encourage research along these lines.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Yes, in Japan, where all petroleum is imported. That is where one would expect such research to take place. I would not be at all surprised if the most immediate practical application of this work were to be in improved battery technology for electric and hybrid electric vehicles.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Talk about Radical Abundance! Thanks for finding this, it's the best talk by Iwamura I've seen so far. It's obvious that this is very mature technology. It's cool to see that they are now able to create platinum from tungsten (almost like creating gold from lead).

I was getting ready to make a similar comment. It may be a fair statement that it is an established laboratory experiment with potential for practical applications. To call it a 'mature technology' seems laughable.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Peter Hagelstein, Mitchell Swartz
Excess power production in the Fleischmann-Pons experiment; lack of confirmation in early negative experiments; theoretical problems and Huizenga's three miracles; physical chemistry of PdD; electrochemistry of PdD; loading requirements on excess power production; the nuclear ash problem and He-4 observations; approaches to theory; screening in PdD; PdD as an energetic particle detector; constraints on the alpha energy from experiment; overview of theoretical approaches; coherent energy exchange between mismatched quantum systems; coherent x-rays in the Karabut experiment and interpretation; excess power in the NiH system; Piantelli experiment; prospects for a new small scale clean nuclear energy technology.

Hagelstein is doing a series of these introductory lectures during the Independent Activities Period at MIT. IAP is the time, January into the first week of February, when anyone at MIT can offer a non-credit course.

MIT as an institution does not endorse "cold fusion" or low energy nuclear reactions (LENR), as is the term these days. In fact, after Fleishmann and Pons announced their experiments, some in the nuclear community at MIT were accused of doing an academic hatchet job on the research.